Tuzigoot

Tuzigoot National Monument (pronounced "too-zee-goot") is part of the southwest US's mysterious history. This small hilltop town was built by the Sinagua people about a thousand years ago, and there's so much we don't know. We don't know what they called themselves, or called this place. We don't know why they left, or where they went. All the names we use would be foreign to them. Spanish explorers named these ancient people Sinagua "without water" since so many of their ruins were discovered in dry, desert locations. The Apache named this site Tuzigoot "crooked water," since it was by a bend in the Verde River. The people started building Tuzigoot about a thousand years ago. Generations of Sinaguans (or whatever their own name was) lived here, expanding the pueblo buildings over a period of 400 years. And then they were gone. (View from the Tavasci Marsh Trail, looking west across the Verde River towards the city of Clarkdale, Arizona.) November 13, 2008